Take Off Your Running Shoes

The JC piece I wrote instead...

of an appeal....

We live in our house – whisper it who dares! – religious and non-religious all together. What’s it like, you’ll be wondering? Like having a prime minister and a prime minister-in-waiting all in the same room, perhaps. Rife with tensions, backward glances, niggling remarks to each other, sources of dispute and confrontation.

Well, no, actually – all the frustrations are purely of a domestic nature in our home. Who does the least housework is a fertile area for argument. But religion? Hasn’t been a problem at all. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing transitional about it – it’s not that we’re on the crux of change, any of us developing or changing: we are where we are and what we are – Jews who practise or choose not to practise in different ways.

When I remarried it was to a man from a very committed Jewish background in terms of involvement with communal charities and relentless support and campaigning for Israel, but with very little Orthodox practice or belief at all. His (then) four children came from a similar background. My (then) three children and I are Orthodox.

When I took Anthony with me to meet an older friend I had visited for many years, her first reaction was surprise. “My,” she said, “you seem very similar. I had the impression you would be so very different from each other!” “Why?” I said, puzzled. “Oh you know,” she said, “the Jewish orthodox versus non-orthodox thing…” And I was surprised that this woman had absorbed some prejudice that somehow I, the rabbi’s daughter, have not; that there are unbridgeable divides between Jews.

In our house the way we do it is that we keep everything according to Orthodox practice within the home. But the youngest of us, for example, the child that Anthony and I had together, and who is himself being brought up Orthodox, knows very well – and what’s more suffers no sense of divisiveness or conflict over it – that some of his closest relatives don’t, for large chunks of their lives, keep the same practices he does. “Hmm,” our little boy said one evening, looking through his father’s family album, “don’t see many kippot in here.”

Other people do it other ways. One family I know where the father isn’t Orthodox has his office at the top of the house and he goes up there on Shabbat and types away on his computer while the rest of the family are all strictly Shabbat – observant.

For my husband, from his warm and loving Jewish background, that option – so much easier for a man in his forties changing a lifestyle – is not an option. We want a home that feels at one with itself, and we have achieved that.

So Anthony practises most things now – again not easy, particularly in the context of remarriage, and when you don’t want your children to feel that divorce means a separation from one’s own children. And also not easy in our small Jewish community where everybody is looking to label everybody else, and don’t quite know how to label this case. But he doesn’t do it out of belief (before we married a Dayan said to him that forty is too late to develop faith – Rabbi Akiva notwithstanding, this Shavuot period) – or at least not a belief in God, but a belief in that other Jewish concept: shalom bayit.

And we have it, we have this peace in our house. Well, you know, beneath the uproar of daily squabbling over who does what, who’s woken up whom, who has the remote control and who exercises supremacy over the computer.

The children ask questions. Daddy why do you do this? Mummy, how are we supposed to manage when your husband doesn’t wear a kippa? And we tell them that they are having a chance to see different ways – though you know, we are all Jews – and that’s of value in itself. And I talk about the destruction of the Beit Hamikdash because of “sinat chinam” : people hating each other for no reason, a Jewish problem of old.

I’d like to think it’s urban myth but too many people have told me recently that one of the London Jewish schools is now sending out questionnaires asking questions like: “do you eat abroad as you do at home?” and “when do you wear a kippa?” and most invasive of all, “whom do you ask for advice on issues of family purity; to which rabbi do you go?”

Like those who go into JFS not to teach but to insist, to say, “ first you must take on the practices, then you will learn” there is an unpleasant tendency afloat in this community. When did Jews become judges of each other, rather than people who practise?

The Jewish Chronicle challenges us...

My sixth JC column runs next week. I had always planned it as an appeal for the CTRT fund - my original arrangement was just to do six columns for the Jewish Chronicle, culminating with a direct appeal. But then they asked me to do more than six, so, for the moment I've said ok, (although I am starting to wonder if I am strong enough any more to keep to deadlines).

But I decided this sixth column should be an appeal anyhow, and wrote it earlier this week knowing I was heading for a crash and better get all work out of the way. Here's what I wrote:

Hi. Me again. Originally I just said I’d do a few of these columns and then curl back up in Hendon. But guess what happened?

Turns out I’m so good, the paper can’t manage without me. Well, that’s what the new(ish) chap said anyhow. Did you know a new guy’s been running this paper for some time now? Can’t use his name, he’s far too modest, wouldn’t even allow his own journalists to put him at number eleven in the JC Top 100 list. (How terrible for his mother, my mother-in-law said, sighing. What kind of a son does that to the family? And then, slowly, it dawned on her. She was making her way up the list to the very top, you know, the number one spot where she was expecting to find her own son. And then she realised just what kind of new editor we are dealing with. Like it’s not bad enough that he’s depriving his own mother of some well-deserved satisfaction, what does this ingrate do – he goes and lavishes that same blanket modesty over my mother-in-law’s son. Who gave him the right? She wants to know.)

So anyhow here I am again. I didn’t say yes straightaway, even though his opening offer was “anything that you want, Dina, just to save the paper” or words to that effect anyhow. Like, uh, no pay rise, no change in basic conditions whatsoever. Naturally, a little bit more negotiating – aw please, I said, can’t I just have a decent picture of myself to go with the column – which produced some hearty chortling I can tell you, and graciously I consented to, basically, rescue the JC. My mother-in-law thinks I could have held out until the issue in which they name her son as the JC Power One, but I explained to her that up here – at the top, you know – stuff just doesn’t work like that. It’s all a bit more subtle in the stratosphere, I said kindly. Hmph, my mother-in-law said.

I explained stuff to the new editor softly too; yes, he can draft me in to attract zillions of new readers, but I’m afraid he’s lost my mother-in-law’s subscription forever. And of course, none of the rest of the family will be buying the paper anymore, since that unfortunate bit of excess modesty by the new chap on my husband’s behalf.

In essence then, I’ll be writing here, but nobody related to me will be reading it. Which is a marvellously liberating sensation actually.

And so to business. I’m raising money. Is there any other kind of business? The money is to help build a cancer trials unit at Mount Vernon cancer hospital in North London. The unit will cost one million pounds. The girls at my children’s school, Hasmonean, have put on fashion shows and walked many miles to add to the coffers. The lawyers at my husband’s practice went on bicycles – some for the first time in fifteen years. A friend is running 500 miles. My husband’s brother handed out bonuses at his bank with one hand, simultaneously sliding the details of the appeal into the eager recipients’ other hands.

And still we are only about a third of the way to the total amount. I don’t want to run a marathon – I’m not sure I could at the moment anyhow – so I write instead. I wrote this book, Take Off Your Party Dress (Pocket Books £7.99) the proceeds of which go to the appeal. I write this blog, Take Off Your Running Shoes, and I told my readers that each of them should give a pound a week for a year to the appeal, £52 each.

And I appealed to the readers of my Guardian columns, who responded instantly and magnificently. But still we are not there yet.

When you want serious money you come to the people who already give. It’s the ones who write cheques every month, every year, who will continue to write cheques. It’s you – the Jewish community.

There is a plague of cancer out there – breast cancer is stalking our women and our daughters – and the cure is out there too somewhere. But we haven’t found it yet. Cancer trials are a route to the cure. The research done in this country is increasingly respected. Why? Because, thanks to the NHS, everybody, from whatever class, gets treated in this country, so the results from trials done here are valuable, in comparison to results from other countries monitoring only those bits of the population that can afford expensive cancer drugs.

Last week a social worker from a hospice came to visit me, and said: “Do you think much about dying?”

These are the reasons I’m asking you to donate to the CTRT appeal. Because you are my people, and you are the ones who give already. And because I am too young for somebody to be asking me whether I think a lot about dying.

You can donate online at www.justgiving.com/dinaspage or by post to CTRT Appeal, The Clocktower, Mount Vernon Cancer Centre, Northwood, HA6 2RN.

But then I get home from hospital on Friday to be told that the JC editor won't let the column run as written - the space is for think-pieces and this one is too self-referential. Well, I get that....but we argue it back and forth, while I hurriedly write another column for the space (deadlines don't know about illness), and then finally, he says: "OK, when you reach £50,000, then you can run a direct appeal in your slot." So, that's the challenge. Editors...they're just so, uh, bracing, aren't they?

800 word moan about hospital food

Latest Jewish Chronicle piece:

FRIDAY lunchtime a few weeks back, and I’m an
emergency hospital admission. “I need kosher food,” I
told them as they folded me into bed. “Oh, we need
forty-eight hours notice,” they said. But with a
couple of phonecalls (and this was before the clocks
had changed so Fridays were still ‘short’ – it was
just three hours to Shabbat) the Hospital Kosher Meals
Services had delivered and I had food.

This is no small thing. You can be admitted to any
hospital, anywhere, and even with a tight Shabbat
deadline, you can have kosher food. So that Friday
night, though the hospital was too far from home for
any of my family to be with me, I had roast chicken
and carrots and potatoes. These things matter, and I
applaud the Hospital Kosher Meals Service.

But – like the old joke: “the food was terrible, and
oy, such small portions” – I applaud and I am
grateful, but also I don’t think the service is good
enough. Every single aspect of kosher food in this
country has improved in the past twenty years, except
one: the Hermolis meals sent into hospitals,
efficiently provided though they are, remain dire.
This is not food to make the sick well.

I needed food that Friday night. Apart from the tray
in front of me I was also on a drip delivering
nourishment intravenously, so much did I need
nutrition that Friday night. But the kosher food was
triple wrapped in plastic that my hands could not
penetrate, nor could the plastic cutlery provided. (In
some hospitals they give you little scissors to
penetrate the Hermolis plastic, but even these can be
tricky to manoeuvre when you are weak.) And I am
young; I cannot imagine how very old people would open
this food at all.

And – sorry, here’s the old joke again – once the
plastic is penetrated the food is unbelievably
offputting. I’ve had every menu choice Hermolis
provides now, during various hospital stays (four over
the last three years) and so I’m not just basing this
on one hospital stay. I can see that the slab of
chicken or fish is a good size, and decent quality
too, but it is invariably coated in some vile,
gelatinous gunge and the accompanying vegetables come
coated in matching shades of glue.

Back in the early 1970s my family moved from Toronto
to London. I knew about England: every morning along
with O Canada, we also sang God Save the Queen at
school. I’d studied Britain too; I knew that in London
small boys were sent up chimneys, and were generally
poorly treated.

I put my hand up and told my teacher, “I am moving to
London, Mrs Johnston.” Mrs Johnston, an amiable,
white-haired lady, looked up, quite shocked. “Oh no,
dear,” she said to me, “not London, England; you’ll be
going to London, Ontario.”

It’s hard to remember now that London is such a
crossroads for every nationality, but back then in the
early Seventies, my Canadian teacher was right. People
from England moved to Canada; it was very rare for the
traffic to flow the other way.

My father decided we would embark on this adventure by
boat, the QEII. My mother loved it; she discovered
fruit machines and cute little coins called shillings.
My father is fine wherever he has his books. And the
rest of us? Well, I remember there were wide
staircases and chandeliers, a cinema and a dance
studio, but mostly I remember the food.

We were on the Captain’s table the whole week – my
father the senior cleric on board, I guess. When the
captain’s food arrived, our meals came too, a
matching menu, but for one thing. Ours were
foil-wrapped and labelled Hermolis. Never mind boys up
chimneys, we came from Toronto, a land flowing with
kosher bakeries and restaurants. Hermolis was our
first introduction to the English version of kosher
food, and every single night we threw it up.

Our parents exchanged glances when they saw this food.
“We have to move,” my father had written to my mother
in an aerogramme from London, when he went on a pilot
trip. “There is much to do in this community.” Neither
then, nor now, have either of my parents met Melanie
Phillips, but they certainly had the sense that Jewish
life in London was of a very straitened and
beleaguered nature.

When we arrived here, there was one kosher bakery, and
come Pesach, there were constant food shortages. Boy,
have things changed. It’s not Tel Aviv, or Paris, yet,
but there is good kosher food in London.

Except one place. The most important place of all,
perhaps. Competition has improved every aspect of
kosher food in this country. It is time for the
hospital kosher meals service to be challenged.

God...again

There's a review of TOYPD in today's Jewish Chronicle, written by Robert Low, European Bureau Chief of Reader's Digest. This is funny because if you were playing the game of match the book to the reviewer, I suspect even the most accomplished players of the game might not have come up with this particular match - and if anybody at the JC is reading this, I'm curious to know how the match was made. But it's a lovely review (for which many grateful thanks!), which you will have to buy the paper or subscribe online to read in whole.

However, he raises the God issue again, just like my Simon and Schuster editor, Kerri Sharp.
Low writes:

The one thing that is missing is religion. Though Rabinovitch is clearly an observant, Orthodox Jew, there is little reference to this side of her life in relation to her illness, beyond such things as querying whether she should fast on Tisha B'Av. It would have been interesting to know whether she had found any solace in religion during such an ordeal.

"OK, well that," Anthony said, reading this bit of the review to himself, "was written by somebody who doesn't know you."

I suppose I wonder exactly what lies behind this fascination with how religious people cope with illness. It comes up quite regularly - American doctors telling me that people who know they are being prayed for deal with their illness better than others. For the record I don't believe God sent me this illness, nor do I believe that God will cure it for me. These things happen for physiological reasons we don't yet know - but will one day work out - and the cure will be discovered too.

And now, you know, it's erev erev erev Pesach and the last thing religious Jews like me have time for is discussions of religious faith! Chag Sameach everybody.

You can't get the JC online...

Below, my latest Jewish Chronicle piece. Accessing the JC online is a real nuisance, something I talked about with JC editor David Rowan, and it's all to do with advertising apparently, but it probably won't be long until David Rowan sorts it out, because he seems a "sorts out" kind of guy, looking at how much sharper the JC is these days. I'm really looking forward to the week I make a direct appeal for the CTRT fund in the JC, because I want to compare the response with the amazing response from Guardian readers - but that's a few weeks away yet. In the meantime, here's what I wrote this week:

Hello. My name’s Dina and I am a Dependent Jewish Voice.

I figured you’ve heard an awful lot about the others, the Independent Jewish Voices (herewith known as the In-crowd), and probably you’d like to hear about me now. We do have some stuff in common, me and the In-crowd. For example, Harold Pinter and I share a manicurist, something I wrote about in the pages of the Guardian newspaper, which is something of a house journal for us Voices. You can read all about it on the Guardian website, a place you can find a lot of stuff about the Voices. One of the main strands of thought you find on the Guardian website is completely partial criticism of Israel; the other place you find that sort of unmitigated Israel-bashing is in the pages of the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz. It’s one of the reasons I feel so at home on the Guardian. Internal dissent, one of the oldest Jewish traditions we have.

The difference between me and the In-crowd though, is that they are independent, of course, and I am dependent. On what do I depend? Well, these days it’s drugs, mainly. I depend on a series of drugs to fight the cancer in my body. When one stops working, which happens pretty regularly actually, I depend on the doctors to have another drug up their sleeve to stall things a while longer.

As it happens, since having cancer, it’s probably easier to list the things on which I no longer depend, dependences I once took for granted you might say, but no longer can. For example, I no longer depend on:-

1) being around to see my grandchildren
2) taking the next five years for granted, and the five years after that, and so on
3) feeling that the doctors actually know what they’re talking about
4) booking tickets for something special with my kids and being able to take them, instead of having to have a suddenly-scheduled operation
5) feeling ordinarily tired instead of cripplingly tired
6) enjoying food
7) being winter-pale; I’m turning yellow at the moment, something the doctors say they will deal with, but in the meantime the fact that Queen Esther was reputedly green and stunning is absolutely no consolation whatsoever
8) eating food and gaining weight; these days I drop pounds no matter what I eat and,
9) bizarrely that is no longer any kind of cause for celebration – in fact it sickens me now every time I see a magazine headline about losing 20 pounds for summer.

Lord, there’s just tons of stuff I used to depend on that has simply been snatched right away from me. It’s why, I guess, the things I am still able to depend on matter just so much.

Last week we were in Israel with the children, and I took my oldest and youngest child to something called the Time Tunnel, a fairly overpriced theme park type of ride right in the centre of Jerusalem, in the basement of Beit Agron, actually, where most of the newspapers have their offices.

You strap yourself into these seats, and in front of you a huge screen fills with images of the history of Jerusalem – in twenty minutes they get through several thousand years, with sound and motion added in.

Apart from nausea the strongest impression you come away with is how flimsy, how fragile those milliseconds were when the Jews lived securely in Jerusalem. And you walk away wondering if that’s how it’s going to look in two hundred years time, like this time we’re having now – this complex, troubled, deeply imperfect but secure time – will be just another blip in a series of others’ empires: another Ottoman, another Christian, another Moslem time. You wonder whether we are going to sit once again by the rivers of Babylon, and weep.
And you wonder whether we’re going to bring it on ourselves, by virtue of our own infighting, our hatreds of each other based on nothings, the emotional vacuum which we fill with mutual loathing, which brought the Temple crashing down in times gone by.

If you’re a Dependent Jewish Voice like I am, this troubled time is too much to relinquish. Of course there must be justice for the Palestinians – is there anybody who thinks differently? But we need justice too, we need a homeland we can depend on. We are living in the age of cancer, when mothers can no longer count on holding their children’s children, and now more than ever we need to know the mother country will be there for the generations to come.

My name is Dina and I am a Dependent Jewish Voice.

Dina Rabinovitch’s book, Take Off Your Party Dress is published by Simon and Schuster (£7.99). www.dinablog.com

Shoe shopping? So last century...

Where have I been all day? I've been domain-shopping. It's like this. I had lunch with David Rowan, who's not content with just resuscitating the Jewish Chronicle, he's taking my fundraising in hand too. The conversation goes as follows:

"Look Dina, if you're going to be in The Sun and in You Magazine, that is mainstream, that is lots of people. And not one, not a single one of those readers is going to be bothered to type in bla,bla,bla running shoes dot typepad dot blablabla to get to your fundraising page. You need a domain."

"Ok," I said.

"You go to register.domain.com and you see what's available. This afternoon."

Actually, he did even better than that; later on he sent me a list of some of the available domain names. But men and women shop differently, don't they? So he sent me a list, and all I had to do was choose one, right? But I end up in the world of domains (by the way, it's just another, more accessible web page, for anybody who's wondering) and I have to browse a bit, I can't just buy the first domain I see.

I'm going back in now, back to domain mall, and I may be some time...

Chez David

For those who read my latest Jewish Chronicle column, (Friday 22nd December) and thought it didn't make sense, it didn't. Bits of it were left out, meaning it ended, in the paper, with an example of communal non-cooperation, rather than a plea for co-operation. Here's how it should have read:

These things render one impotent: cancer, and war in Israel.

The mystery surrounding the increasing cancer all around us is this: women in Japan have a low incidence of breast cancer, but move them to Ohio, and within two generations their breast cancer risk is among the highest on the planet. This statistic is brandished an awful lot in breast cancer circles, but it remains shrouded, a piece of information that we’re hearing, but not getting.

Nobody knows the reason, you see. Nobody knows why Japanese men, for example, have the highest proportion of smokers per population but don’t have the highest rates of lung cancer (reserved, once again, for us in the West.)

Here is another set of statistics. Breast cancer now accounts for 30% of all cancers in both Israeli and Palestinian women. But the incidence of breast cancer is significantly greater among all Israeli women – in Israel the rate is 95 in 100,000 Jewish women and 46 in 100,000 Arab women (2000 statistics) – than among Palestinian women. In the Palestinian authority, the rate is 15.2 in 100,000 (1999 statistics). Some of this can be accounted for by less advanced diagnosis techniques, and slower reporting, but not all of it.

Even amongst Jewish women in Israel, there are differences; those of Western origin have a higher rate of breast cancer than those from Moroccan or Yemeni families (the Yemenite have the lowest risk of all). Women in Jordan and Egypt have less breast cancer than those in Israel. But there is another phenomenon showing up in Palestinian and Arab women from other Middle Eastern countries outside Israel – they are getting breast cancer younger, and it seems to be a more aggressive strain.

Tokyo to Tennessee is one thing, but when these kind of differences show up in populations as close to each other as Ramallah and Jerusalem, you have to ask how hard can it be to work out what the populations are doing differently? Apparently, it’s pretty hard, because nobody has done it yet.

Why not? Cancer drugs reap profits; work out what’s causing cancer, and maybe those expensive drugs won’t be needed, so what financial benefit is there in that? This is enough to make cancer specialists, daily confronting the limitations of their treatments, despair. As for the rest of us? We’re the pawns. What can the small person caught up in this big medical business do?

In November, a six-year project of co-operation between Palestinians and Israelis, called Project Cope, came to an end. It is a project which survived the violence.

There were meetings of Israeli and Palestinian breast cancer patients, and of medical staff. The Palestinian women came from places like Beit Hanina, Abu Dis, Beit Jala. There were 21 Israelis compared to 16 Palestinians, but a greater proportion of Palestinian women came to more meetings. They came even if they had to cross roadblocks, even if they were going straight from the meetings to the funeral of a victim of Arab-Israeli violence. This, the powerless can do: they can talk to each other, bypass those whose interest is in keeping us sick, or at war.

The Israeli-Palestinian public health magazine, Bridges, sums up our impotence in the face of violence and how it coincides with health issues. “Not surprisingly,” the editors write, “the dead, the physically and mentally wounded, the disabled, the bereaved, and the destruction of health facilities fall under the responsibility of the health sector, which,” and here comes the wry comment, “…is never consulted when wars are declared.”

Are women, are mothers, more impotent than men somehow? How is there war anywhere in the world, when it is so impossible to think of letting your son step out the front door to go to war?

We, the powerless, think up impotent small steps towards a bigger peace; in Project Cope-speak it’s called, “people to people co-operation”. Like this one for example. The children tell me the following tale. If you step on the bus outside Hendon Library (in North-West London, but you know, Hendon is but the larger world refracted into its tiniest splinters) at about 4.15 any school afternoon you can witness the following scene – and I have.

The schoolchildren, all from Jewish schools, are divided into tribal lines. The JFS children occupy the top deck, at the back. Hasmonean takes the middle ground, and the Menora children are huddled at the front. These children do not mix. There is something deeply horrifying in this. And something we should ask ourselves during this season of Limmud, which half the community attends, and half do not. Where did our children learn such bizarre cross-communal behaviour?

There is incurable cancer, there is war in Israel, children, but this you can do, for us, the impotent adults who worry: make friends on the bus.

Dina Rabinovitch’s book, Take Off Your Party Dress, will be published by Simon and Schuster.

JC editor David Rowan has been kind and understanding, and also offered me coffee in recompense: I've said 32 courses in Washington DC won't compensate, but I shall report back. What I'm thinking is here's another good way to get a major organisation to donate to the CTRT appeal. This is also what I'm thinking about Simon and Schuster, who are, so far, taking my blogs about them in bracingly good part. But I haven't asked them for the big donation yet....I will keep you posted.

Cancer: good for the Jews?

During this current spate of Jewish holidays, I've been sitting in shul, looking around at the wholly non-Guardian reading population in the women's gallery and thinking, hmmm, there's about three hundred people here, how do I get a copy of Take Off Your Party Dress into each set of these hands? Then, hey presto, David Rowan of the Jewish Chronicle sends me a postcard, saying he read a piece I wrote in UK Press Gazette complaining that cancer shouldn't be a feature story, it should be op-ed, kind of like what I say here, and I can have access to his op-ed pages.

Which is why we have a new party game in our house: just how many different Jewish angles will I get out of this illness? Anthony says, as a joke, "chemotherapy and Jewish morality" which keeps him amused all the way from kitchen to his study, leaving me a little non-plussed, because I've just written - for real - the following phrase: "...it's amazing how many people round my way seem to think there's a kind of moral backbone in the way one deals with chemotherapy..."